Reframing Infidelity

There are many ways to betray someone, says Jessie Collins, and being unfaithful isn’t always the worst one.

There is a scene in the movie Moonstruck where Olympia Dukakis’s character Rose Castarini, who has discovered after decades of marriage her husband is having an affair, asks John Mahoney, a philandering college professor, why men cheat. He regales her with an eloquent speech about being drawn the light in a young woman’s eyes. She stares at him directly and says, ‘I think it’s because they fear death.”

The correlation between fear, death or not really feeling alive and infidelity is a line long-drawn. The reality is, we rarely feel as potent as in the first throws of passion, it is a full-on hormone overload the like of which very little else in your life can compete. Add in danger, secrecy and the temptation of forbidden fruit and you have possibly one of the most addictive emotional cocktails known to woman and man.

Yet, the reality is, as we live longer, have partners for longer, and often if we enter midlife with a longterm partner, that passion has changed and aged a little, replaced with lots of other nourishing, rewarding connections but perhaps nothing like the intensity of those first heady rushes. For some, that’s a relief. Not everyone enjoys being so overwhelmed, or the loss of control you can experience when you suddenly find yourself enthralled to someone else.

I do believe there are many women and men in midlife for whom the idea of an affair would be not just unconscionable but also just extraordinarily disruptive, risky and a complete anathema to the order in their life. It can bring chaos, destruction, pain and distress. I remember even as a teenager when a friend’s dad had an affair, and while her parents managed to make it through it, her mother at the time became a physical shadow of herself, eating barely anything for weeks at a time.

But what really constitutes an affair? Is it the physical act of being with someone else, or is it cheating in an online forum, or just fantasising excessively about someone else? Is an affair always the end of a relationship? As always, the psychotherapist Esther Perel asks one of the most pertinent questions, “How do we forgive what is universally forbidden but is universally practised?

The number of guys (and I know there are women also doing it) openly admitting to being married but looking for an affair is a hallmark of dating apps. In many ways, they are taking enormous risks, and they often follow their marital declaration with a ‘don’t hate me’ disclaimer. For many of us, our first instinct is to condemn married people openly looking for an affair, or just extramarital sex, righteously question why they don’t just have the courage to get out of an unhappy marriage. Yet, the truth is, the whole area of infidelity is something we have failed to really honestly grapple with.

The fact that it is a much more complex and nuanced thing than we are perhaps, particularly in this society, willing to admit and engage with is undeniable.

As Perel says, this is a universal truth, people have affairs, and yet we are no further along really in the conversation about how, in the arc of a long relationship, we live with that truth. Fidelity itself is a construct born out of an era long gone when men relied on fidelity to know that his children were his, and who should get the cows when he dies. But nowadays, as Perel says, “It’s never been easier to cheat, and it never been more difficult to keep a secret.”

And with that has come a strange inversion of circumstances. Divorcing used to be the shame, now staying with someone you could leave has become the new shame. We value loyalty highly in modern relationships and it is often the betrayal that is the most damaging thing. But while through religion and societal norms, affairs have been painted as the ultimate betrayal, this in itself a very narrow definition of the act of betrayal itself. I would argue that you can betray people in a multitude of ways, by emotionally abandoning them, by not returning the support and love they have given you when they need it most.

Betrayal comes in many forms, and infidelity is just one, and not always the most damaging.

Yet those betrayed in a relationship by an affair feel it is the most demonstrative judgement on them as a person, as a lover, as a partner. But often, it is not an act of turning away from the other person, but, again as Perel says, “from the person we have become”. “It is not so much that we are looking for another person, as we are looking for another self. Death and mortality often live in the shadow of an affair because they realise the question, is this it?”

Years ago, I would have said that an affair would be it. The end of something. And in many ways it is, but I believe now it can be the end of something with someone and the beginning of something else with that same person. I have seen people be abandoned, abused and cheated on without anyone ever having touched another person’s skin. Perhaps it is time to think differently about what constitutes infidelity. Affairs are less about sex, and more about desire, a desire for attention. Rather than damning those out there openly looking for it, we might look at how we frame and feed desire.

Because to feel wanted is to feel alive in a way like no other.